take him for a humble country priest. He waits in the hall, emotional and shivering, fingering the tarnished gilt tassels of his hat and looking with a suspicious eye on his strange surroundings of medieval virgins and reliquaries cheek by jowl with pagan goddesses."
Anatole France, on the other hand, play-acting for the moment, is unusually conscious of his dignity as a prince of the realm of letters. "His fullest, most sumptuous dressing gown envelops him, girt at the loins with an antique tasseled cord of gold and yellow. On his head is the most brilliant of his skull caps; for out of all the collection of caps—moiré, silk, velvet, Persian cloth, Jouy cloth—he has chosen one of cardinal red. . . . He descends some steps and takes the bishop's hands in his.
"'Monsignor,' he says in a devout voice that seems to issue from his nose, 'I am deeply conscious, as indeed I ought to be, of the great honor that you do me.' And he makes a low bow."
The bishop returns the compliment, while Anatole France plays with a heavy gold ring, and then explains that, to be entirely frank, he is acquainted with the works of his host only by hearsay, having refrained from reading them out of regard for his mother, Holy Church. To which France elaborately responds that he knows the bishop's religious zeal and purity; that he himself has never read any of the bishop's episcopal charges; but that he is deeply grateful to him for making clear "that it is not possible to be at once a good Catholic and a good republican." They fall then into a discussion of great writers who were also good Catholics; and France contends that the bishop's favorite, Chateaubriand, was in reality but the inventor of a
